Plumtree’s Potted Meat represents Bloom’s frustration with his failures in his home, job, and marriage. It’s also a prime example of Joyce’s masterful wordplay. In Joyce’s Dublin, “potting meat” was slang for having sex, and Bloom also uses “potted meat” as a euphemism for Paddy Dignam’s corpse (“meat”) getting buried (“potted”) at his funeral.
Bloom first comes across Plumtree’s Potted Meat in a newspaper advertisement: “What is home without / Plumtree’s Potted Meat? / Incomplete. / With it an abode of bliss.” Bloom considers this ad awful, and strangely enough, it’s placed under the obituaries (which foreshadows the pun about Dignam’s corpse). In comparison, Bloom’s ads are much better—but he struggles to sell them because other people don’t take him seriously. Accordingly, the Plumtree’s ad reminds Bloom of his frustration at work.
The ad promises “an abode of bliss,” or a happy home—something else that Bloom desperately wants but can’t have. Joyce is joking that Bloom has to “pot the meat” (have sex with Molly) in order to make his home blissful. In this way, the ad is also taunting Bloom about his unhappy, sexless marriage. Surely enough, Blazes Boylan brings a pot of Plumtree’s over to Bloom’s house, shares it (has sex) with Molly, and leaves “some flakes of potted meat” in the bed.
Plumtree’s also connects to the sexual metaphors in Stephen’s “Parable of the Plums.” And finally, beef is a symbol of English colonialism in Ulysses: Bloom sees cattle getting exported to England for slaughter, which symbolizes England’s theft of Ireland’s labor and natural resources. Curiously, while Plumtree’s was an English brand in real life, in Ulysses Joyce makes it Irish. Perhaps, by bringing Plumtree’s back, he hoped to help make Ireland an independent “abode of bliss.”
Plumtree’s Potted Meat Symbol Timeline in Ulysses
